Elvis Costello Wednesday, July 8

Who loves the sun? Not this guy.

In April 1991, Elvis Costello released an unsettling promotional video from his upcoming album, Mighty Like a Rose. The opening shot is of waves lapping in slow motion at night, double exposed with a close-up of Costello's scowling face. Only, it's not the clean-shaven, skinny-jeans Costello of the '70s and '80s. He has long hair and a scraggly beard to match. He's swapped his Buddy Holly glasses for tinted John Lennon spectacles, and he's all decked out in black. (It was a look, Costello wrote later, that took hold one winter in Dublin, then "became a fixture once I realized how it infuriated people.") Before long, he's singing the song's chorus:

"From the foaming breakers of the poisonous surf/ To the burning forests in the hills of Astroturf/ The other side of summer."

Twenty-four summers later, with global warming sucking California dry and police violence prompting protests nationwide, "The Other Side of Summer" feels prophetic. On first listen, one hears airy Beach Boys harmonies buoying the chorus, and majestic piano runs—by Larry Knetchel, who played organ on "Good Vibrations"—cementing the song's grandiosity. But lyrically, it is something else entirely. With machine-gun pacing, Costello addresses violence and mass unrest ("The casual killers/ The military curfew"), the failings of past social movements ("Because of their mistakes, you'd better be wide awake") and the chronic inability of popular culture to deal with real-world problems ("The dancing was desperate, the music was worse"). Just for kicks, Costello even throws in a Lennon burn, singing, "Was it a millionaire who said 'imagine no possessions'?"

If the song sounds dark, the video is darker. It features shots of a smiling Costello, driving on a sunny beach with a gaggle of French models, intercut with increasingly bleak real-life scenes of tent cities and screaming Los Angeles street people.

"I think that everyone has the experience on certain days of waking up, reading the paper and thinking, 'Wouldn't it be better if man was gone?'" Costello explained to The New York Times in 1991, quickly clarifying that "the song is not saying we should kill everybody" and that he was writing from "the blackest comedic position." In another interview, with the Ocala, Fla., Star-Banner in June 1991, Costello tried to contextualize the song's criticisms of Lennon and Pink Floyd. "Rock 'n' roll has this inherent rebellion, but it also confuses freedom for license a lot, which is dangerous," he said. "It doesn't have any responsibility to itself."

In the age of poptimism, that last observation stings a little. Rebellious rock hasn't charted in at least a decade, and pop music is pathologically opposed to addressing the issues of the day, save for the occasional John Legend tearjerker. Even contemporary folk artists write abstractly, and usually prefer to be called "folk pop." The musical landscape is, much as Costello found it in 1991, full of date-stamped songs about dancing and fucking.

And maybe we don't need songs to remind us that we are destroying the Earth and each other, because we feel it in our bones. Or maybe, just maybe, Kanye West is about to grow out his beard.

SEE IT: Elvis Costello and the Imposters play Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, on Wednesday, July 8. 8 pm. $46.50-$89. All ages.  

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